“All right. If I have to stay awake, so do you.” He jerked the mouse across its pad. The monitor flickered to life.
In the Google search box, he typed the phrase Thomas Huston parents, then read through the long list of hits. Most of the articles were reviews of Huston’s books. But two were profiles of Huston and his latest novel, The Desperate Summer, a book released three and a half years after his parents’ deaths.
The first profile referred to The Desperate Summer as “the author’s first work following the tragic loss of both parents, one by murder, the other by suicide two weeks later.” The other profile, from Poets & Writers, recounted how a wild-eyed junkie had walked into the Hustons’ hardware store, demanded money, was refused, pulled out a Sig Sauer 9mm and shot Cynthia Huston once in the throat and twice in her chest. He then shot David Huston an inch and a half above his heart. Then emptied the magazine, with no effect, into the black Hayman MagnaVault against the wall behind the counter.
The interview section of the profile probed even more deeply.
P&W: I think it’s fair to say that The Desperate Summer is your darkest story to date. So is it fair to assume that the novel was colored by the circumstances of your parents’ deaths?
TH: I had come up with the basic story line well prior to that. But I did most of the writing in the nine or ten months after. And yes, the story line changed, as they always do.
P&W: Changed because that’s the nature of stories? Or because of your parents’ deaths?
TH: Both, I’m sure.
P&W: I’m thinking particularly of the protagonist. Joshua Kennedy has some very dark moments.
TH: He does indeed.
P&W: Do those moments reflect the author’s own state of mind at the time?
TH: Well, every character is, in some way, the author. Some aspect of the author. So, in that case… Listen, to suddenly be orphaned, even at thirty-five years old… I mean, when are the sudden and violent deaths of people you love not a shock? So yes, of course it affected the writing. Of course some of my own thoughts at that time found their way into the novel.
P&W: Now that you have some distance from those events, have you found some peace, some acceptance of what happened?
TH: Distance? You’ve never lost anyone you loved, have you? There’s no such thing as distance.
At that point in the profile, the interviewer shifted gears, moved on to a consideration of the author’s work in progress, a novel tentatively titled D. Still, DeMarco found Huston’s brief responses revealing. It was clear that Thomas Huston, like his character, suffered some very dark moments. But dark enough to cause him to slaughter his own family?
DeMarco knew The Desperate Summer well; it was his favorite of the author’s three books. The fictional Joshua Kennedy, in anguish over his daughter’s rape and his son’s arrest for dealing drugs, vents his frustration with the judicial system and with life in general by resorting to petty crimes—first graffiti, then shoplifting, then vandalism of municipal property. He finds his son’s stash of ecstasy, but instead of destroying it, he samples the drug and spends the next three days in a motel room with a twenty-four-year-old girl, one of his son’s friends. Did that necessarily imply that Thomas Huston himself had ever resorted to crime, drug use, and infidelity as a release from his pain? Of course not. But DeMarco found it interesting that the author would conceive of those activities as emollients for his character’s anger and grief.
The sting of his parents’ deaths was still raw in Huston after three and a half years. Maybe it was still raw last Saturday night. Maybe it had been festering in him all this time, and some trivial thing—a sarcastic comment, a telephone call—had sent the poisons coursing through Huston’s bloodstream, igniting in him a fury that literary palliatives could no longer suppress.
DeMarco made a mental note to pull Huston’s phone records from that night. If he could get a handle on Huston’s frame of mind, maybe he could make an intelligent guess as to where to look for the writer.
In the meantime, he returned to surfing the Internet. Forty minutes later, he came across a promising article Huston had written for The Writer magazine, “Becoming Your Fiction.” It cost DeMarco thirty dollars to subscribe online and access the article.